1980s

Today I’m playing the classic Billy Joel song, Allentown dating from 1982 and from the album The Nylon Curtain. The song focuses on the resolve of the people affected by the downturn in manufacturing, specifically on blue-collar workers in the town of Allentown, Pennsylvania, following the closure of the Bethlehem Steel plant. Despite some controversy over the stereotypical characters portrayed in the lyrics, Billy Joel was given the keys to the city by the mayor of Allentown, who described the song as “a gritty song about a gritty city”.

Following on from yesterday’s song about September, here’s U2’s October from the 1981 album of the same name. Bono said of this song:

‘October’…it’s an image. We’ve been through the 60s, a time when things were in full bloom. We had fridges and cars, we sent people to the moon and everyone thought how great mankind was. And now, as we go through the 70s and 80s, it’s a colder time of the year. It’s after the harvest. Trees are stripped bare. You can see things and we finally realize that maybe we aren’t so smart after all, now that there’s millions of unemployed people, now that we used the technology we’ve been blessed with to build bombs for war machines, to build rockets, whatever. So ‘October’ is an ominous word, but it’s also quite lyrical.”

I hope you enjoy my performance – it’s certainly a bit different from the vast majority of songs I’ve played this year!

Today’s song is Queen’s Radio Ga Ga, or at least my ‘swing’ version of this song! Radio Ga Ga dates from 1984 and was written as a lament to the demise of radio over TV, and the rising importance of the music video over the song itself. Queen drummer Roger Taylor who wrote the song said “That’s part of what the song’s about, really. The fact that they [music videos] seem to be taking over almost from the aural side, the visual side seems to be almost more important.”

Today’s song is ABBA’s Soldiers from The Visitors album, dating from 1981. It’s one of only a few 3/4 ABBA songs, and it reflects on the fact that society does not recognise the work of the military who “write the songs […] and sing the songs that you and I won’t sing”.

This week I watched the brilliant Carpool Karaoke segment from The Late Late Show in which James Corden is joined by Stevie Wonder. Stevie sings I Just Called To Say I Love You – or more correctly “I just called to say he loves you” – to Corden’s wife over the phone. I thought I’d play this 1984 classic today and I hope you enjoy it!

Today’s song is the wonderful Queen song A Kind of Magic dating from 1986. Written by the band’s drummer, Roger Taylor, the song was used in the film Highlander and remains one of the most well-known – and well-loved – Queen songs.

I’ve given this song a bit of a special treatment in honour of a wonderful person whose 60th birthday would have been today.

Having spent yesterday at the Scottish Air Show, the song which came to mind this morning was Take My Breath Away, the love theme from the 1986 movie Top Gun. Written by Giorgio Moroder and Tom Whitlock and performed by Berlin, this song topped the charts all over the world.

Today’s song was originally recorded by The Platters in 1957. Desperate to come up with a follow-up to the very successful Only You, Buck Ram, the band’s producer, says he wrote The Great Pretender in 20 minutes in the toilet of the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas. The reason I chose this song today is that it was later recorded famously by Freddie Mercury in 1987. Freddie Mercury would be celebrating his 69th birthday today.

Today I’m playing Stevie Wonder’s Happy Birthday for my son who turns 14 today. I had no idea about the origins of this song until I did my usual research before posting the song. Stevie Wonder was one of the main figures to campaign for the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. to become a national holiday in the US and he wrote and released this song in 1981 to help promote the cause. Ronald Reagan approved the national holiday in 1983 and the first Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was held on 20 January 1986. The day was marked with a concert where Stevie Wonder performed the song in celebration. There’s more information in this video and to see the amazing, all-star performance from the concert, watch this video from 5:02.